"GZO" 2006 Obituary

GZOWSKI o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-27 published
Pat PATTERSON,
Broadcaster And Writer (1921-2005)
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation pioneer hosted Trans-Canada
Matinee, launched Polka Dot Door and wrote umpteen documentaries,
plays and musicals but always turned down accolades
By Sabitri
GHOSH,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Kingston -- Even in the form of a disembodied voice, Pat
PATTERSON
turned heads. Her firm yet supple contralto, one Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation listener wrote, was "the most beautiful speaking
voice" she had ever heard. Furthermore, said the fan letter,
Ms. PATTERSON's show Trans-Canada Matinee "has helped me raise
my children, kept me informed on world affairs, and acquainted
me with the little but interesting people in the world -- and
always with a chuckle." Added the Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, writer:
"Your audience has always felt that Matinee was you, Pat."
For Ms. PATTERSON, there was no higher compliment. As striking
in person as her radio voice insinuated, the prolific broadcaster,
author and composer wanted her work to speak for her; she was
merely the transmitter. "She was very retiring and very unassuming,"
said her partner, Sheila
GILBERT. "
Her attitude was, 'I don't
want anything. No fuss, no muss.' "
In later years, she recoiled from public attention, even failing
to show up at the 1986 Gemini Awards to pick up the John Drainie
Award for lifetime achievement in broadcasting. Orphaned amid
the festivities, the plaque was eventually retrieved from a garbage
bin (so the story goes) and delivered in private.
The lifetime it celebrated was rarely discussed by Ms.
PATTERSON.
All she would reveal of her early years was her birthplace, Victoria,
and the fact she earned a licentiate in voice and violin. A precocious
only child, she co-wrote her high school's anthem with next-door
neighbour Lucy
BERTON, a sister of writer-historian Pierre
BERTON.
At 21, she joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and drove ambulances
in Britain for the Red Cross. Returning to Canada in 1944, she
moved to Toronto, where she hoped to have a career in advertising.
An agency man referred her to a friend, who referred her to another
friend who worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. There,
she landed jobs in the record library and continuity department.
"It was strictly the understudy in the wings department," Ms.
PATTERSON
told Peter
GZOWSKI on a Morningside interview in 1986. "An announcer
by the name of Frank Herbert was doing an afternoon concert hour,
and I planned that program -- I planned the music and so on.
One day, he was ill, and no one could be found to take his place.
And the boss said, would I like to try it? So I did. And that
was it: I was hooked."
In 1948, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave Ms.
PATTERSON
her own nationwide show, Pat's Music Room, half an hour of her
diverse musical selections. She also lent her voice, programming
skills and writing talents to a host of other network enterprises,
prompting one columnist to dub her a "Jill of all trades."
When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation joined the television
revolution in 1952, the poised and telegenic Ms.
PATTERSON led
the charge. She often served as a pitchwoman for live-to-air
commercials; writer June
CALLWOOD remembered seeing her in one
for electric stoves, "the kind that she just stands there and
says she just loves her stove."
As Ms. PATTERSON's reputation grew, Ms.
CALLWOOD's husband, Trent
FRAYNE, was sent to interview her for Chatelaine. "You two would
be great Friends," he told his wife. When the women met through
a mutual friend, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Dorothy
(Dodi) ROBB, they did indeed get along famously.
"We had the same sense of humour and the same ethics about behaviour
she was a little more Victorian than I was, but we were both
very proper women," Ms.
CALLWOOD said.
When the still-single Ms.
PATTERSON became pregnant and decided
to raise her child herself, she turned to Ms. Callwood for support.
"That was very unusual, to keep a baby in those days," Ms. Callwood
said. "What people did was hide out and give the baby up for
adoption, but she was not going to do that. At the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, which was more broad-minded than most places, it
was still a bit of a shocker."
Through resourceful time management and the help of close Friends,
Ms. PATTERSON managed to rear her son, David, while working on
three radio and two television shows at the same time. It was
a remarkable feat that she divulged to no one but the most trusted
of intimates.
She found sanctuary, as well as creative satisfaction, in her
profession. "You sit in that booth and you are quite private,"
said fellow Canadian Broadcasting Corporation employee Liz
FAWKES,
who befriended the older woman and later babysat her son.
In the pinnacle of her Canadian Broadcasting Corporation career,
Ms. PATTERSON was chosen to host Trans-Canada Matinee in 1961.
Aimed at a daytime audience of women -- even as that audience's
perceptions of itself and its role were shifting -- the public-affairs
program offered interviews with the likes of W.H. Auden, George
Balanchine, and Laurence Olivier.
"If and when women achieve that mythical status they keep fussing
about, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Matinee should deserve
some of the credit," wrote Toronto Telegram columnist DuBarry
CAMPEAU in 1968. "It is lively and literate and any woman or
man listening to it will be both entertained and informed."
Though upset by the abrupt cancellation of Matinee in 1971, Ms.
PATTERSON
smoothly segued into children's entertainment, arguably the love
of her professional life. In the 1950s and '60s, she had collaborated
with Ms. ROBB on a children's musical fantasy, an after-school
television program, and three children's musicals. Now, the partners
set to work on a new children's program, The Polka Dot Door.
Besides composing the buoyant theme song -- still hummed on schoolyards
and playgrounds across Canada -- Ms.
PATTERSON also co-wrote
the first 60 shows. "She had a sense of play, she had a sense
of fun," said Ms.
CALLWOOD, citing these as the cues for Ms.
PATTERSON's
approach to writing for children.
In a 1973 interview, Ms.
PATTERSON also spoke of her strong sense
of responsibility. "I think we're so conditioned, so tuned into
the fact we're writing for children, we have to take care." She
wanted her plays and programs to act as "good influences," she
said, "if not in a moral sense, at least in a getting-along sense."
Ms. PATTERSON's words and music were behind many of the most
durable children's shows of the 1970s and '80s, including numerous
Sharon, Lois and Bram specials and Fred Penner's Place. She also
developed and hosted short-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio series, and wrote plays and documentaries for radio and
television. Her proudest achievement -- a docudrama on the life
of landscape painter and war artist David Milne, A Path of His
Own, which she also narrated -- won seven Canadian Film and Television
Awards in 1980.
A scrupulous craftswoman, she was a critic of her own work, too.
In a 1990 letter, she asked the editors of The Encyclopedia of
Music in Canada to drop all references to her musical Henry Green
and the Mighty Machine, "as it had a very brief life, while the
three musicals previously mentioned have continued to get productions
after more than 20 years."
But real life allowed no such revisions. In the late 1980s, Ms.
PATTERSON
had a permanent falling-out with Ms.
ROBB, which affected her
personally as well as professionally. Even more devastating was
her son's death in 1994 from cancer. "That was a disaster," said
Ms. FAWKES. "
You don't want your children to go before you."
Pat PATTERSON was born in Victoria on December 4, 1921, and died
in Toronto on December 19, 2005, of cancer. She was 84. She leaves
her partner, Sheila
GILBERT.

GZOWSKI o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2006-07-14 published
George BAIN, 86: Political columnist set standard
A must-read in Canada for nearly 40 years
Helped clarify muddle over 'fuddle duddle'
By Isabel TEOTONIO,
StaffReporter
For Canadian political junkies from the 1950s through the 1980s,
George BAIN's newspaper column was a must-read.
Witty, urbane, and an incisive observer of Parliament Hill and
Washington,
BAIN's elegant prose and musings about politics and
politicians informed and delighted readers for more than 40 years.
Remember "fuddle duddle," the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau's
explanation of an expletive he directed to an opposition member
of Parliament in the House of Commons? Thank
BAIN for setting
the record straight on it.
The rest of the Ottawa press gallery reported only that Trudeau
"mouthed an obscenity" in the now-famous 1968 incident. In his
Globe and Mail column,
BAIN wrote that Trudeau told the member
of Parliament to fuck off, and without the dashes -- the first
time the word had ever been published in a Canadian newspaper.
BAIN, who also wrote for The Toronto Star, died in Halifax yesterday
(May 14) at age 86. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
"He wrote the most important column in Canada," said Val
SEARS,
a former Star reporter who worked with him. "He was the most
stylish of the people writing about Canadian politics. His columns
were often hilarious, which made him tremendously popular."
"George wrote with real wit and style," said Tim
CREERY, a former
Southam News and Montreal Star reporter who worked with him in
Ottawa and Washington.
"He was clever and funny and not a guy who accepted the party
line."
BAIN's column in the Globe set the standard to which political
columnists aspired. He was considered the unofficial opposition
in Ottawa and never cowered from pointing out when politicians'
words didn't square with their actions.
Allan FOTHERINGHAM, who himself occupies a formidable place in
Canadian journalism, once called him "the wittiest columnist
ever to grace Ottawa."
When the late Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio giant Peter
GZOWSKI was asked if he read
BAIN, he responded, "Do Catholic
priests read the Bible?"
BAIN's "
Letters from Lilac, Saskatchewan.," were columns in which
he created fictional prairie reactions to political events. The
columns distilled his trademark humour and wit, were hugely popular
and were later published in a book.
Born in Toronto in 1920,
BAIN quit school at age 16 to work as
a copy boy at the Star for $6 a week. But he ended up back in
school, vowing to return to the paper over the summer.
"I can't explain where his interest in newspaper work arose but
he had the reputation of being a funny guy -- not a class clown
at North Toronto Collegiate," said brother Ian
BAIN, who attended
the same school.
When he returned to the Star that summer, the editor who'd promised
him a job was on vacation.
Rather than "waste a streetcar ticket," as
BAIN later told a
reporter, he went over to the Toronto Telegram and was hired
on the spot.
He worked there until 1941, when he became an Royal Canadian
Air Force bomber pilot -- despite a fear of flying that lasted
throughout his life. He served in Britain and North Africa, piloting
Wellington bombers on raids against Italy. He was given temporary
leave to act in a film about the air force.
At the end of the war,
BAIN was lured from the Telegram by the
Globe, where he wrote about municipal politics. He eventually
moved on to Queen's Park and Parliament Hill.
In 1957, BAIN opened the Globe's first London bureau, where he
covered Europe, Africa and the Middle East. From 1960 to 1964
he was posted to Washington and reported on the civil rights
movement, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.
In 1964, BAIN returned to Ottawa to begin work as the national
affairs columnist and remained there for nearly a decade.
He returned to the Star as editorial page editor in 1973, but
realized he didn't like the committee process of writing editorials.
"Writing editorials is like wetting your pants while wearing
a blue serge suit," he once said. "Nobody notices and it leaves
you with a warm feeling."
The next year, the Star sent him to London as a European correspondent.
Editors at the Star knew him as a "perfectionist" who would rewrite
his opening paragraph 30 times before being satisfied.
BAIN's last newspaper column ran in the Star on August 10, 2001
a fitting end to a career launched in those same pages.
"There are very few people to whom you could apply the word giant.
Pierre Berton was one and I think Walter Stewart was one and
certainly George
BAIN was one," said former King's College journalism
professor Eugene
MEESE, who worked with
BAIN.
BAIN and his wife
Marion were eventually seduced by Nova Scotia
and in 1982 they designed and built their home in Mahone Bay,
complete with a wine cellar to house his vintage collection.
While out east, he continued writing about wine while serving
as dean of journalism at King's College in Halifax and maintaining
a critical watch on Ottawa for two Halifax dailies.
BAIN authored books including I've Been Around and Around and
Around, Letters from Lilac, Champagne is for Breakfast, Gotcha
and Nursery Rhymes to be Read Aloud by Young Parents with Old
Children, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
AfterMarion died in 1998,
BAIN's health deteriorated. He is
survived by his son Christopher and grand_sons Sam and Jonathan,
his brother Ian of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, and sisters
Moyna SEIDERMAN and Sheila
BAIN of Vancouver.